mrpike2

Here is your answer. Those two people are both you! One is you while you worked, paying higher taxes so retirees could live in dignity and not pay taxes on their reduced income when they retire. Now, you're retired and it's your turn to get a break and the Republicans changed the rules of the game in order to give billions in tax breaks to millionare lawyers, doctors, auto dealers, franchise food owners and loquor store owners.

Everyone works and everyone retires, so now, everyone will have to pay taxes when they work AND when they retire.

Young people will now have to work longer and save more before they retire just to give tax breaks to millionares.

You don't promote consumerism by raising middle class taxes to pay for billions in tax breaks for in state and out of state business millionares.
Total business taxes in Michigan were among the lowest in the country BEFORE Snyder and the Republicans shifted a huge portion of them onto middle and lower class citizens.
If you want to talk about unecessary regulation and paperwork, you have a point.

Classic race to the botttom. Private sector workers are losing their pensions, so public sector workers need to lose theirs too. There was a time when most American working citizens, no matter where they worked, received a safe, middle class retirement. We are losing that. How is that better for the country?

If it were that easy, why are the pension funds so underfunded now when the state knew exactly how much was required? They can't do it, so shift the responsibility onto regular working citizens. Taking a plan that is not working in the private sector and extending it to the public sector is just making a bad situation worse.

Pension were only a problem for the auto companies because they didn't fund them as they should have as they went along. Instead, they wasted the moneyoin get rich quick schemes to increase annual bonuses, like purchasing Saab, purchasing Fiat, purchasing Volvo and investing in money losing Europe and Third World countries.

What's your vision for how an American citizen with a college education should live? The lifestyle of a teacher is consistent with mine. Obviously, you think Americans are grossly overpaid and live like kings and queens. We disagree.

When you have an "unfunded liability" you have to fund it. The state should do the same. The state should pay it's bills before it gives billions to millionare lawyers, doctors, auto dealers, fast food franchise owners and liquor store owners who aren't "creating" new jobs.

It's in GM stock. The nonpartison Congressional Budget Office estimates it would have cost the US government $123 billion to let them fail. We are way ahead if we never see another dime, which we will.